💜[01/16] the creativity for good friday five

Fandom allows us to collectively imagine and participate in better, more just, and more satisfying stories than the ones presented to us as fait accompli. It allows fans to, for instance, express collective outrage over the tendency to kill off pop culture’s queer, disabled, BIPOC, and sex-working characters, and then use what’s called “fix-it” fic to give those characters better storylines. Rabbinic text, too, participates in fix-it fic of a kind—as when, for example, it imagines a pious Jew mouthing off to a Roman soldier and not just living to tell the tale, but actually changing the soldier’s way of thinking. Such acts of imagination can powerfully shape real-world relationships of genuine care and support. The ability to draw a convincing portrait of a better world is, after all, a crucial skill for making a crisis feel just livable enough to keep on for a little bit longer.

Last summer, the city of Portland paid millions to descendants of Black families forced from their homes by racist urban renewal projects. It was an effort decades in the making. And one of the driving forces was a local librarian.

Through her own research, the librarian discovered that her grandmother’s home was demolished by the city ahead of a planned expansion of Emanuel Hospital. The expansion never happened, and the city never paid a dime to the librarian’s grandmother.

A plaintiff in the lawsuit who goes by the name Byrd, the librarian later transmuted the traumatic events she helped document during a decade of research into what she calls “wearable history.” Byrd chose jackets made of denim, which she calls a universal fabric, as her canvas. She embellished the jackets with materials that reflect the story of gentrification, including colorful textiles, chains and signs printed on fabric.

Byrd does not see herself as an artist, and hardly even takes credit for making the jackets. Instead, she says, it was a spiritual journey to craft the jackets while immersing herself in the history of displacement.

“They created me,” Byrd told Street Roots. “I didn’t sit down and plan to study the history for 10 years. It came to me. It is all so spiritual. My spirit protected me by giving me a way to communicate that is nonverbal. They are words unspoken.”

Things I scorned for so long—because the world hates women, and things women love are not respectable—have been so good for me. They gave me a place to land, these stories about love. And maybe I’m tired, beyond tired, so tired I broke apart, of caring about being respectable and smart and reputable as a public intellectual; maybe all that drained the joy from my life a long time ago. And the world is too bad for that; the world is too bad to admit that badness inside. Guilt and pleasure should only go together when your pleasure hurts others, which reading romance novels doesn’t. It never hurt anyone to read a story about love.